To get around this, Majid Sarvi from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, turned to social insects. Ants were used to provide data on the behaviour of panicking crowds "at low cost and with no need for ethical approval", says Sarvi.

His team used a citronella insect repellent to make Argentine ants flee from structures with varied exits and obstruction positions. The layouts the ants exited most swiftly were those with exits in corners rather than in the middle of walls, even if these were partially blocked, (see video above). Those in the middle of the wall tended to jam up, creating confusing flows of creatures.

The best layouts were then tested using a computer simulation of human behaviour. Evacuation times were reduced by 62 per cent when people in the model left via a corner exit with a large structural column in front of it compared to a lone exit in the middle of a wall.

Caution is required with this analogy, however, says Paul Townsend, simulation and modelling manager at the consultancy Crowd Dynamics in Knutsford, UK. "Where real evacuations have been filmed, very rational behaviours are observed - with people helping people they have never met before.

"So to relate ant behaviour to that of humans a precise definition of 'panic behaviour' is needed if this is to properly inform space design," he says.

Buoyed by their ant success, the Monash team are now set to study non-panicking behaviour too, by using another critter: the woodlouse. "Using larger species than ants, we hope to get them to move en masse in normal, non-panicking modes which are hard to observe with ants," Sarvi says.

Correction:When this article was first published on 29 May 2013, it suggested that simulated human evacuation times reduced by so much that the people would have been travelling back in time.

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